SALE OF MODERN SOUTH ASIAN ART NETS OVER $10M
New York, September 20, 2007.

Today’s sale of South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art at auction house Christie's in New York realized $10.1 million, established 12 new world auction records and was led by Tyeb Mehta’s Mahisasura, at $1.1 million. With many of the top-selling works still belonging to the Progressive Movement Artists, the sale was equally driven by extremely strong prices obtained for contemporary artists.

Atul Dodiya’s place in the artistic pantheon has been firmly taking shape and the result achieved for Three Painters, which at $541,000 more than tripled its pre-sale estimate, only confirms his position as one of South Asia's leading artists. In the cutting-edge contemporary field, many prices wildly exceeded pre-sale estimates including for Rameshwar Broota’s Untitled ($265,000); T.V. Santhosh’s haunting Across and Unresolved Story ($217,000); Shibu Natesan’s Montage I ($157,000); Ravinder Reddy’s Untitled ($187,000) and Rashid Rana’s extraordinary photo collage A Day in the Life of a Landscape ($133,000).

TOP TEN SOUTH ASIAN ARTISTS IN THE SALE

These results certainly bode well for the Asian Contemporary Art sale in Hong Kong at the end of November which will include a select group of works by Indian and Pakistani artists.